The 1990's decade has been marked by a societal technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. Like all such revolutions, it unleashed a great ripple effect of technological waves. The effect has in turn driven technologies which have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. Two of these technologies are the internet-related distribution and object oriented programming systems. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communications distribution channels, and the World Wide Web or internet which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility reached "critical mass" and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With the expanded accessibility of tens of thousands of programmers to each other, not to mention to potential users of such programs via the expanded internet client base, an obvious need became apparent: cooperative programming systems wherein program developers could coact to continuously expand and enhance existing programs in a distributed programming environment. Object oriented programming offered the solution. With its potentially interchangeable objects or units, object oriented programming systems have found acceptance as the programming system for the internet. In all areas of data processing and communications, as well as the electronic entertainment and consumer industries having anything to do with the internet, there has been a substantial movement to object oriented programming systems and particularly to the Java programming system. A major significance of Java is that it is an internet or World Wide Web distributed programming system where literally thousands of program developers and users are continually upgrading and changing the programs. There arose a need for programmers and users to readily being able to display program documentation in a clear and comprehensive manner in natural language. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which had been the documentation language of the internet world wide web for years, offered an answer and more. It offered direct links between pages and other documentation on the web and a variety of related data sources which were at first text and then evolved into media, i.e. "hypermedia".
Now the combination of Java object oriented programming and HTML has taken an even greater advance in Web pages: Java code and programs are being created which will exist on web pages where they offer the user the option of downloading and executing such code or programs when the page is being browsed. These programs are embedded in the web page as applets.
With all of these rapidly expanding functions of web pages and like documentation, it should be readily understandable that the demand for web documents has been expanding exponentially in recent years. In addition to the proliferating standard uses of HTML for text and media related world wide web pages for commercial, academic and entertainment purposes, the Java documentation program, JavaDoc, will produce standard HTML files for outputs to computer controlled displays to provide standard natural language displays of the program documentation. Thus, HTML has become the display language of choice for the internet or World Wide Web. It is used there for all forms of display documentation including the markup of hypertext and hypermedia documents, usually stored with their respective documents on an internet or web server in addition to the above described programming distribution. HTML is an application of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), an ISO standard for defining the structure and contents of any digital document. It should be recognized that any of the aspects of the present invention illustrated with respect to HTML would be equally applicable to SGML. For further details on Java, JavaDoc or HTML, reference may be made to the texts "Just Java", 2nd Edition, Peter van der Linden, Sun Microsystems, Inc., 1997, or "Java in a Nutshell", 2nd Edition, by David Flanagan, O'Reilly publisher, 1997.
It must be recognized that HTML, as well as other markup languages for web pages, originated at a time when the demand for web pages and related documentation was relatively modest. It could be said that the present day demand on web page resources and markup languages was probably inconceivable when these were developed. Accordingly, it is the objective of the present invention to provide implementations which go well beyond conventional general data compression whereby the markup languages used in web page development, transmission and use may be downloaded and used more effectively with less wasted time.